FRAGMENTOS VEGETAIS DA CAATINGA E MÉTRICAS DA PAISAGEM: UMA ABORDAGEM NO CONTEXTO DO PROCESSO DE DESERTIFICAÇÃO.

In the geographical context, Landscape Ecology makes it possible to identify factors and implications applicable to environmental appropriation. Shapes and processes are measured through quantitative description and research on the structure of the landscape using various of indexes. In this study, we aimed to analyze how metrics of the landscape to discuss environmental changes and impacts on the landscape over a five-decade time scale, to monitor the landscape evolution and environmental deterioration in the municipality of Canudos-BA. This location is in the Susceptible to Desertification Area (ASD), in the state of Bahia, where climatic aridity dominates. The application of the metrics took place by the manipulation of five maps of use and coverage of the environment of geographic information system (GIS), from the definition of two preponderant classes, plant fragment and anthropic polygon. A vegetation was identified as a landscape matrix; however, in the depression area, where the agricultural use is intense, there is a vegetable shredding and many fragments of caatinga arboreal and shrubbery has decreased, disappeared and/or were dispersed between the years 1977 and 2017. In Canudos-BA, the anthropic polygons increase in one average of 28.89% over the decades; regarding the years 1977 and 2017, there was a significant increase of 503.82km², equivalent to an increase rate of almost 100% in the number of anthropic polygons. These areas demand conservation practices to avoid extinction of plant fractions, exposure of soils to the weather, and expansion of factors of environmental vulnerability to desertification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]